The Case of Cuba and the North Korean Ship

Diplomats have long employed disingenuous turns of phrase to avoid conceding inconvenient and sometimes self-evident truths that could compromise or embarrass their nations. While artfulness is preferred, bald-faced lying is also part of the protocol. When the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, says, for instance, as he has been wont to over the past year, that Russian arms shipments to Syria’s Assad régime are not offensive in nature and mere obligatory fulfillments of old standing orders—made long before the country’s civil war—he is, most likely, lying.

It is difficult to know, as yet, just why Cuba would have wished to secretly load two MiG-21 fighter jets, fifteen MiG engines, and two anti-aircraft missile systems of Soviet vintage onto a North Korean cargo ship, the Chong Chon Gang, which then concealed that cargo underneath ten thousand tons of Cuban brown sugar. But the explanation that Cuba’s foreign ministry quickly offered on Tuesday, a day after the ship’s dramatic seizure by suspicious Panamanian authorities at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, was somewhere between decidedly strange and scarcely believable. The cargo was indeed Cuba’s, said the foreign-ministry communique, consisting of “obsolete defensive weapons” which was being sent to North Korea for “repair.” If the Chong Chon Gang’s mission was as prosaic as that, then it’s captain certainly overreacted when, as the Panamanians boarded his vessel, he attempted to commit suicide by cutting his own throat, while his crewmen mounted a resistance against their captors.

The Chong Chon Gang, it has emerged, is a known rogue ship, having been stopped and searched with suspicious shipments on several other occasions. In 2009, it was seen in the Russian naval base of Tartus, in Syria. A year later, it was found to be carrying drugs in the Ukraine. North Korea is known to operate a fleet of such ships; it is suspected of using them to procure hard currency for Pyongyang by ferrying black-market weapons here and there across the seas. There is also some evidence to suggest that North Korea is on the prowl for missile components, as part of its ongoing effort to build a missile system capable of carrying one of its nuclear warheads. North Korea is subject to U.N. sanctions for its nuclear-weapons and missile-development programs, and so member states are prohibited from sending it missiles. To wit, if Cuba’s foreign-ministry statement were found to be untrue, Cuba would be in flagrant violation of its obligations to the U.N. And so the foreign-ministry communique contained a solemn reaffirmation of Cuba’s commitment to “peace, disarmament, including nuclear disarmament, and respect for international law.”

Panamanian authorities had become suspicious of the ship after it left the Russian Pacific coast and, in June, passed through the Canal into the Caribbean. It then disappeared. The ship’s satellite tracking system appears to have been switched off intentionally during the late stages of its voyage to Cuba, its time in port there, and until its July 10th reappearance at the Canal.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, in early July a high-level North Korean military delegation visited the island and met with President Raúl Castro. Cuba and North Korea may be fraternal powers, two of the world’s last officially declared Communist states, but it’s still difficult to comprehend why Cuba would risk the international position it has by being caught out in a covert alliance with a nuclear rogue state. Could Cuba be so cash-strapped that it has begun selling off part of its Soviet-era arsenal to the North Koreans, or via the North Koreans to the highest bidder?

Or might the Cuban foreign ministry’s statement be truthful after all? The one argument in its favor is that the world can sometimes be a very weird place. In addition to offering a general description of the weaponry it had sent away to be fixed, the communique went on to say: “The agreements subscribed by Cuba in this field are supported by the need to maintain our defensive capacity in order to preserve national sovereignty.” Publicly, the Panamanian government and others seem willing to take Cuba at its word for the moment, with a straight face.

Photograph by Carlos Jasso/Reuters.

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.